It is a basic fact of American life, so widely known that it hardly needs to be said: College is getting ever more unaffordable. In survey after survey, Americans say that the cost of getting a degree just keeps rising.
But this basic fact of life is not a fact at all. In reality, Americans are paying less for college, on average, than they were a decade ago. Since the 2014–15 school year, the cost of attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation, according to College Board data analyzed by Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. (Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend a public institution.) The cost of attending a private university has risen in raw terms over the same time period, but is down 12 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s. “People have it in their heads that prices just keep going up, up, up,” Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. “And that’s actually not what’s happening.”
The confusion comes from the idiosyncratic way in which college is priced. Schools set a staggering official price that only a subset of the wealthiest students pay in full. Universities rely on that money to offer financial aid to low-income students; in effect, rich families subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else. This means that there’s often a chasm between the published cost of attendance, or sticker price, and what people actually pay once financial aid is factored in, or the net price. Unfortunately, the eye-popping sticker prices tend to get the most attention. Within higher-education reporting, articles anticipating the arrival of the $100,000 year of college have become practically a genre unto themselves. “There’s massive problems in the higher-education sector—and we focus on all the wrong ones,” Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, told me. “We can’t stand the fact that the sticker price is so high despite the fact that nobody pays it.”
Read more at The Atlantic.
